I didn't make it to the reading. Did anyone go and rip the guy for getting it all wrong?

What can I say? I went, I enjoyed it. And the book is fiction that happens to nail some things, some places, and some people damn near perfectly. Sorry, but I think saying he "got it wrong" is beside the point. It's a novel. He read the passage at, ahem, Crazy Lady's where the Plains States get thoroughly trounced and he meets unknowingly meets Nic Devine. A lot of the dialogue in that passage didn't really ring true to me until I heard the author read it out loud...then it made complete sense. Not that it'll ever get made into a movie, but I think it would work really well that way.

Honestly, holding this book to some sort of accuracy standard doesn't seem fair to me. Save that for Eric Davidson's upcoming tome...

I think the night went very well. Didn't do a head count, but I'd say around fifty or sixty of us were there. Mick led off with a really impressive dissertation on '60s Columbus garage rock and related topics, without any notes and seemingly off the top of his head. My jaw dropped so far that it fell off and is probably still bouncing around somewhere out there. Then Matthew came up, clearly and carefully explained himself and his motives, read the passage from the book in which the narrator meets Nic for the first time (without realizing that he's meeting Nic), read it in such a way that I felt I was right there at Crazy Lady's with them both, and then we all spent a good bit of time, thirty or forty minutes or so, asking him questions and getting them fully answered. I think that regardless of what one's opinion was of the book going into the thing, he or she had to come away feeling that Matthew's heart is in the right place, and that he wrote it out of a sincere appreciation/love of Columbus and what the town meant to him during his time here. The evening concluded with Mick and a friend performing three acoustic numbers, followed by Matthew signing copies of That Summertime Sound in Wexner's shop.

I really enjoyed it, too, and echo the comments about Specktor's candor, sincerity and love of Columbus. He was impressively articulate, funny and insightful during the Q&A. Very cool to her Mick play some tunes, too.

Tomorrow night (Friday) from 8 to 9pm on "Yesterday's Top Secrets" (98.3 and 102.1 FM, streaming at http://www.wcrsfm.org) I'm going to be playing tunes from Matthew Specktor's songlist, which appears on his website at http://blog.thatsummertimesound.com/. Here's what he writes in that list's preface:

"I get asked a lot what I was listening to while I wrote That Summertime Sound. Usually my mind goes slack and I just want to say…Everything. I’ve done various playlists for various blogs, but in the interest of being a little more encyclopedic, whipped up this still-incomplete list of bands, albums, CDs and singles that re-caught my ear while working on TSS. I don’t usually listen to music while I write, but for this book, I made an ear-splitting exception. I wrote and revised much of it whilst blaring the most appropriate, least-conducive-to-meditative-thought music imaginable. Frankly, it was a blast, and if I never write about rock-n-roll again, I may yet repeat the experiment."

I'll also be playing an A-side from one of the Boys From Nowhere singles, and our featured artists for the third straight week will be The Who and Husker Du, two bands that we'll also hear at the beginning and end of tonight's special "Mr. Brown's" episode.